Apple ban boobs and skin on the App Store

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Even though a wide variety of entertainment iPhone apps for adults flooded the App Store the instant Apple relaxed its submission guidelines a few months ago, the company is now changing its mind and sayinging ‘no’ to sexy programs, allegedly due to numerous complaints about this type of content.

According to TechCrunch, it all started with Wobble iBoobs, the iPhone app that does exactly what the name suggests. Jon Atherton, the developer behind it, said that Apple emailed him to let him know that his app fell prey to a new App Store policy change regarding apps that sport overtly sexual content. The fact that the Wobble app ships with no babe images and instead asks users to select an image from their photo library didn’t help.

According to Antherton, the email from Apple suggested that the Cupertino firm was changing guidelines due to “user complaints.” Here’s Apple’s email in its entirety:

The App Store continues to evolve, and as such, we are constantly refining our guidelines. Your application, Wobble iBoobs (Premium Uncensored), contains content that we had originally believed to be suitable for distribution. However, we have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately.

We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter. If you believe you can make the necessary changes so that Wobble iBoobs (Premium Uncensored) complies with our recent changes, we encourage you to do so and resubmit for review.

Sincerely,

iPhone App Review

TechCrunch quoted an Apple representative who shared little detail about the new policy besides re-iterating that the company is taking customer complaints seriously:

Whenever we receive customer complaints about objectionable content we review them. If we find apps that contain inappropriate material we remove them from the App Store and request the developer to make any necessary changes to their apps in order to be distributed by Apple.

Atherton himself was allegedly able to squeeze more useful information from an Apple representative. According to the developer’s blog post, Apple has laid out the following new rules:

No images of women in bikinis

No images of men in bikinis

No skin (I asked if a Burqa was OK, and the Apple guy got angry)

No silhouettes that indicate that Wobble can be used for wobbling boobs

There are around five thousand applications in the App Store that feature sexually explicit or implicit content of some sort. Any of those apps could be pulled off the store if they don’t check against new guidelines. Interestingly, the Playboy app wasn’t affected at press time.